Deprived of a daughter who combined every quality suited to engage his affection and elevate his hopes, an only child, the heir of his throne, and doomed apparently to behold the sceptre pass from his posterity into other hands, his sorrow must be such as words are inadequate to portray. Nor is it possible to withhold our tender sympathy from the unhappy mother, who, in addition to the wounds she has received by the loss of her nearest relations, and by still more trying vicissitudes, has witnessed the extinction of her last hope in the sudden removal of one in whose bosom she might naturally hope to repose her griefs, and find a peaceful haven from the storms of life and the tossings of the ocean. But, above all, the illustrious consort of this lamented princess is entitled to the deepest commiseration. How mysterious are the ways of Providence in rendering the virtues of this distinguished personage the source of his greatest trials! By these he merited the distinction to which monarchs aspired in vain, and by these he exposed himself to a reverse of fortune the severity of which can only be adequately estimated by this illustrious mourner. These virtues, however, will not be permitted to lose their reward. They will find it in the grateful attachment of the British nation, in the remembrance of his having contributed the principal share to the happiness of the most amiable and exalted of women, and, above all, we humbly hope, when the agitations of time shall cease, in a reunion with the object of his attachment before the presence of Him who will wipe every tear from the eye.

The fruition of religious objects calms and purifies as much as it delights; it strengthens, instead of enervating, the mind, which it fills without agitating, and, by settling it on its proper basis, diffuses an unspeakable repose through all its powers.

As the connection between means and ends is not so indissolubly fixed as to preclude the possibility of disappointment, and the battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift, nor riches to men of understanding, the votary of the world is never secure of his object, which frequently mocks his pursuit by vanishing at the moment when he is just on the point of seizing it. He often possesses not even the privilege of failing with impunity, and has no medium left between complete success and infallible destruction. In the struggles of ambition, in violent competitions for power or for glory, how slender the partition betwixt the widest extremes of fortune! and how few the steps, and apparently slight the circumstances, which sever the throne from the prison, the palace from the

tomb! So Tibni died, says the sacred historian, with inimitable simplicity, and Omri reigned. He who makes the care of his eternal interests his chief pursuit is exposed to no such perils and vicissitudes. His hopes will be infallibly crowned with success. The soil on which he bestows his labor will infinitely more than recompense his care; and, however disproportioned the extent and duration of his efforts to the magnitude of their object, however insufficient to secure it by their intrinsic vigor, the faithfulness of God is pledged to bring them to a prosperous issue.

The Hon. William Robert Spencer, born in 1770, was the grandson of Charles, the sec ond Duke of Marlborough. He was the author of some spirited translations and of some ballads. The composition that follows has been so much admired that it has appeared in nearly every collection made since it was written. The little that is known of the author is not much to his credit. He died at Paris in 1834

BETH GELERT, OR THE GRAVE OF THE GREYHOUND.

WILLIAM ROBERT SPENCER. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 269

He called his child; no voice replied;

He searched with terror wild;
Blood, blood, he found on every side,
But nowhere found his child.

Ah, what was then Llewelyn's pain!

For now the truth was clear:
His gallant hound the wolf had slain
To save Llewelyn's heir.

"Hell-hound, my child's by thee devoured," Vain, vain was all Llewelyn's woe;

William Wordsworth was born in Cumberland in 1770. He was sent to Cambridge by his uncles in 1787, where he studied the classics and the Italian language, and read what his fancy chose; but as he neglected mathematics, his rank was not high. He did not incline either to the church or the bar, but determined to make his slender patrimony last till the public should acknowledge his merits as a poet. In youth he was a furious republican, approving even of the French Revolution; in his age he opposed every just measure of political reform in his own country—a striking illustration of Emerson's saying, that "a conservative is a radical gone to seed." During the poet's long life he had changed his residence several times, but he settled at last in the place with which his name is now forever connected - Rydal Mount. His sister Dora was his constant companion, the complement of his nature, and more truly poetical in feeling than he. Without her his verses would probably have been still more like the burlesque in Smith's Rejected Addresses: —

"My brother Jack was nine in May,

And I was eight on New-Year's day," &c., &c.

Doubtless there is a poetry as well as a beauty in common things; but the early theory and practice of Wordsworth would make no distinction between a village gala day and an oldwife's washing day, - between Bonaparte after Waterloo, with a continent lost, and a fisherman with a broken net or a swamped boat. That Wordsworth came to greatness was not by following to absurdity his early notions, but by preserving his severe simplicity of style,

while he raised his eyes to higher ideal subjects, and by rejecting, as unworthy of the muse, the mean and trivial affairs which all people know and experience, but do not care to see set down, with or without rhyme.

The friendship of our author for Coleridge and Southey forms a prominent feature in his life, for which the biographies must be consulted. He was happily married, and it was to his wife, after three years, that he addressed the charming little poem, —

"She was a phantom of delight," &c.

He died in his eightieth year, having passed a serene and honored old age. It is too soon, perhaps, to say what is to be his place among poets. For many of the minor poems we can predict the affectionate regard of generations. In proportion as readers attain to a certain spiritual height, their admiration for Wordsworth as a philosophic poet must increase. We doubt whether his longer poems, especially The Excursion, which, as Lord Byron says, is

"Writ in a manner that is my aversion,"

deserve to be or ever will be popular. The poet has been too impartial: like the sun, he gilds a cow-shed as soon as a palace; whereas the function of the writer, according to Em erson, is to select the "eminent and characteristic experiences."

Wordsworth's complete poems, in seven volumes, are included in the Pickering edition.

ODE.

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD.

The child is father of the man ;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

I.

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

II.

The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose,

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare;

Waters, on a starry night,

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

V.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us our life's star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar,

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy;
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy;

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy ;

The youth who daily farther from the east
Must travel still is nature's priest.
And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

VI.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And, even with something of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim,

The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate man, Forget the glories he hath known, And that imperial palace whence he came.

IX.

O, joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive.

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction: not, indeed,

For that which is most worthy to be blest,

Delight and liberty, the simple creed